SilverStone Raven RV04 Case Review

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Raven RV04 Detailed Features

If you thought the exterior was interesting, just wait till we get to the inside…

…but one more observation and I’ll move on (yeah, we’re back to the door). The lines on the front make an interesting subdued design on the back of the door too, and it reminded me of that scene in Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne is painting the Kevlar bodysuit black. If SilverStone ever wanted to make a special edition of the RV04 (or just an alternate design), I think they’d have a hit if they drew some inspiration from the materials that suit uses (carbon fiber and Kevlar – of course, it is a fictional item, so there’s some wiggle room I would hope…). Those materials aren’t cheap or easy to work with, so I can completely understand why they weren’t used (carbon fiber by itself is very brittle as well, so that still wouldn’t solve the shipping problem). Still, for a premium option…just a thought anyway. Would you like to see carbon fiber and Kevlar on consumer PC cases, or is that “modder only” territory?

Okay, with that aside we can dig into the RV04’s internals a bit more before we start the build. Removing the side panels highlights the inverted motherboard orientation and showcases the hot swap bays (and CPU heatsink support) at the bottom. A removable drive cage sits behind the bottom AP fan, while the PCI-E slots will get their own blast of air from the top fan. Just picturing the components installed reveals a pretty smart layout – each zone of hot chips will get their own direct stream of cool air. Some of the other Ravens were pretty large and used more than just two fans – the RV04 is almost mid-tower sized and promises to offer a similar level of performance to its earlier siblings.

Here’s a closer look at a unique addition to the RV04 (and a benefit of inverting the motherboard). This adjustable stand can be positioned to support a large CPU cooler heatsink assembly, adding some peace of mind to the longevity of your components. As the twin 180mm AP fans offer such great air-cooling performance, a tower heatsink seems to be the obvious choice for this chassis (although 120/240/360mm rads would fit too).

I’ll skip ahead a bit to show that SilverStone’s own Argon AR03 fits perfectly after a little adjustment (the manual helps here, and is pretty useful overall in describing the various unique features of the RV04). I’d imagine almost every air cooler (besides some unique options like the Zalman 9900MAX series – although with careful placement it’d be possible!) could benefit from this support, or it can be folded neatly out of the way if you don’t want to utilize it.

The RV04 doesn’t ignore support for the graphics cards either. Three brackets are included that attach to this removable brace – of course, you can omit these entirely as well, but when you get into the larger GPUs it is nice to be able to support them somehow. The Sapphire Radeon 7970 in the above picture has started to noticeably sag after almost two years, so the inverted mounting and support brackets are very welcome.

Pulling off the top panel opens up quite a bit of room to work. The anti-vibration pads for the power supply unit “rails” are visible, and there’s room for any size of PSU (especially if it doesn’t have to share room with optical drives, which are installed in the front of this area. The filter for the power supply is easily removable and shares the same “high-flow” mesh as the front filter.